


Sentimental

by a_pocket_full_of_fancy_words



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Apocalypse, Arguing, Bones Wears a Pretty Dress, Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, End of the World, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Loss, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-06
Updated: 2014-02-06
Packaged: 2018-01-11 10:37:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1172048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_pocket_full_of_fancy_words/pseuds/a_pocket_full_of_fancy_words
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the end of the world.<br/>Jim is angry, Spock distant and Bones is miserable, sentimental and depressed.<br/>Catharsis is an evening gown in a beat down country house during a snatched moment on the road.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sentimental

**Author's Note:**

> Contains a rape reference which is NOT implied to actually take place; allusions to cannibalism; probable loss of a child.  
> Republished because I ballsed up the description and couldn't find a way to sort it out.

"For God’s sake Bones, you’ve gotta quit being so goddamn sentimental!" Jim shouts for the nth time that week.

Spock says nothing. The stolen donkey – so much for the sanctuary – who carries what they can't is chewing hungrily at the rotting wood of the door.

“You nearly died for a stuffed fucking toy!” Jim’s fury would’ve broken here before, but now he was tougher, angrier, uncompromising. When his command meant nothing to anyone any more he still threw his rank up against Bones, and on a few occasions, Spock, and kept them cobbled together.

Leonard had changed too. In books and movies, people living at the end of the world become hardened survivalists, or they simply die. Bones has done the opposite; tearful, vulnerable and depressed, kept alive by Jim and Spock and the sheer force of Jim's will. He slows them down. He would kill himself to get out of the way except that he’s under no illusions that he’d improve their chances - their chances for what? No.

He clutches at the toy giraffe and cries, tears streaming his cheeks in the face of Jim’s anger and the magnitude of their loss. He doesn’t apologise, because he isn’t sorry.

They’re in the storage shed of a nearby country house, four hours’ cycle – they always travel by bike - from Atlanta. Stay away from the cities. There’s a gun and some rations hidden in anticipation of a natural disaster that never happened and some packets of garden seeds here, and the sentimentality in Bones that so terrifies Jim had seized upon them in what the straggling trio all knew was a false hope.

He storms out of the shed in a flurry of tears, tripping over Jim's bike, and marches up the ragged, dead yard towards the house. Don’t go in houses alone, Bones. You never know what you’ll find in there, you never know who you’ll find.

Jim doesn’t follow this time, and that hurts almost as bad as the scolding. There’s no chance of avoiding discovery by the people in the house, he’s simply being too loud, but nonetheless he still goes through the motions of checking each room. All empty. The people who lived here did not have a child - unless perhaps they were Vulcan. Leonard supposes he will be one of the last people to ever see a Vulcan - and nowhere for him to curl up in his memories.

Instead he goes to the master bedroom, places Joanna's giraffe atop the still-made bed and looks through the wardrobe in one last “fuck you” to Jim’s treatise on sentimentality.

The people who had lived here had been women, or at least they had all worn dresses. Most of their clothes were moth eaten, strips stolen away by a final generation of rats hoping to raise young. There’s one though, still covered in a protective plastic suit cover, a lavender lace gown of ankle length, low backed, fastened simply with a strap around the neck and a thick satin ribbon around the waist.

For a short moment he looks at it wistfully, thinking that Joanna might have looked good in it if she’d grown to fill it out. Then he laughs through his tears, emptily. No. Daddy’s little tom boy didn’t wear lace.

He decides instead that the dress must be for him.

He strips out of his greying, tattered uniform and stands buck naked next to the dress. The mirror in the wardrobe door contains a man he doesn’t recognise. Old eyes, new scars, battered bones and barely any meat. His skin is dirty, uneven; there’s no hair on his left arm where it fell out due to shock and sickness.

Stepping into a dress like that with a body like this is sacrilege. Too much of that in this dying world. He does it anyway.

Slides the material up over his sweat and mud streaked legs, up past his hips, watching himself in the mirror, a hideous creature swallowed by a thing of luxury.

He hears a noise behind him, and his heart hammers in his throat. There are footsteps behind the door and he’s nearly naked, has no weapons except what is left of himself.

He moves away, but the backs of his knees hit the front of the bed and he falls onto it. It’s his own fault; he broke the rules and came in alone, didn’t check for a basement. Maybe Jim’s got sick of him and they’ve moved on without. Maybe they've been taken.

The knob turns and he wonders if he’ll be raped before he dies, if he’ll be eaten. If he’ll be mourned. He doesn’t know of Jim  _can_  mourn any more.

And then Spock steps through the door and into the bedroom.

“Doctor?” He asks, and Leonard knows he’s quaking in fear. Leonard is not a doctor any more, but he doesn't say so; he thinks maybe that little things like that are all Spock has to hang on to.

He doesn’t say anything. Of course it was Spock. But nobody still alive was fool enough to anticipate a friend being responsible for creaking floorboards.

Spock closes the door delicately behind him and walks to the foot of the bed, so close their knees bump.

He looks down at the Leonard and the dress, up at the wardrobe and the moth eaten clothes and the broken man in the mirror.

Then he bends down, slips his hands under Leonard’s armpits and hauls him to his feet. The dress begins to fall, but Spock catches it and pulls it up in the space between them.

Leonard can feel the slide of Spock’s hands against his body through the lace and ducks his head for the Vulcan to put the neck strap over it.

Then he turns them both until Leonard is standing facing the mirror again and Spock is behind him.

He watches his sullen, strange reflection as Spock reaches round his waist and pulls the ribbon around him, slowly tying the bow and smoothing it against his back.

They both stand there looking for a long time. Two pairs of eyes roaming over Leonard's body and the dress. It's loose on his bones, but most things are. It looks like an image superimposed onto a photo taken in different lighting; out of place and time. Spock's fingers run over the ribbon, touching the long-lost softness while he can.

“She may not be dead,” Spock says at last, breath ghosting over his ear. “There are an estimated seven thousand survivors in North America. She may be alive here, or she may be among the two point two million refugees to escape before the quarantine was enforced.”

They're terrible odds, but he can't bear to say so. He almost thinks it would be better to know she were dead, rather than just be  _almost_  certain.

His legs go from underneath him, refuse to bear up under any more affliction, and Spock drags him to the bed. He lies down, Leonard still held against his chest.

Spock reaches around for giraffe and proffers it next to McCoy's face. Bones sniffs it hopefully, but all of Joanna's scent has gone now. She wouldn't have left her giraffe, he thinks, and sighs loudly, tucking it beneath his chin.

“I know it's not... logical,” He says quietly. It occurs to him how infrequently he hears that word these days, another relic, like the giraffe and the dress, like "Doctor".

“That is an untruth.” Spock's hand finds the ribbon again, stroking and holding against the human's stomach. McCoy isn't sure if he means to say that it isn't illogical, or simply that he doesn't trust the human to find it so.

“We could die here.” Leonard's voice finally holds the detachment, the finality it ought to.

“No.” Spock tells him. “We will not.” He doesn't speculate about the future often. None of them do. “We have four point 2 years until quarantine is lifted, and then we will leave and Jim will be back where he belongs and Earth will be... a bad dream.”

Spock romanticising the present as a bad dream and imagining they can survive for five years is only proof of their imminent demise. Leonard cannot afford to think of dreams. “Joanna,” He says. Even a dead Joanna is worth every dream he's ever had; he'd trade it all for a nightmare with her in it.

“I know. I am sorry.”

They lie in the moment for a little longer, thinking of a great many things in low and vague detail, until it shatters with the turning of the door handle.

Bones curls against Spock, giraffe clutched against his chest as Jim stands and watches them, expressionless.

He suddenly feels foolish and undeserving, stupid for putting on the dress and letting it mean something to him when it shouldn't even matter, when it can't matter next to Joanna's empty room.

“I just wanted something to be beautiful.” He whispers, clutching at the giraffe, as though Jim might take it, might take Joanna's memory from him in his mission to purge them all of history.

Jim's anger breaks like a wave and recedes back down the beach. “You are beautiful, Bones.” He murmurs apologetically, toeing off his lax leather shoes. “I'm sorry I said those things.”

He kneels down by the bed, his hand on Leonard's arm, and Spock shuffles them back to make room for him.

Jim squeezes on, carefully leaving room for Joanna's giraffe. “I'm sorry,” He repeats. He rests his palm on top of Spock's at Bones' waist. “I know you need your sentimentality... And I don't want you to change. Not really, anyway.” He pecks the corner of Leonard's mouth, tiny quick kisses. “You're the last best thing, Bones. So I'm not gonna let you go without a fight.”

“Let's just sleep here awhile.” Leonard says, and they do.

The next morning, as with every morning, he isn't sure that he wants to wake up. But he does, hungry and frightened and in a bed with the only two people he still recognises on Earth. And if they do survive for the next four years, they do make it to the end of the quarantine period, or even if they don't, then he's grateful for them, at least.


End file.
